Lion and Tin Man split up to flank the agents’ position while Scarecrow kept pressure on the official vehicles parked twenty yards away. A pistol popped up over the hood, fired toward Scarecrow, and swept back toward the van, driving Dorothy to cover. By that time, Lion had the angle and dropped the two men into the snow.
The quiet after the attack was surreal. Weapon still at his shoulder, Scarecrow swept the area for other threats.
DeVaca’s voice was calm. “Informe!”
None of the mercenaries replied in English, though all three understood the language. Lion changed magazines. “Claro.”
Clear.
The Tin Man reloaded. “Claro!”
Scarecrow didn’t take his eyes off the parked vehicles. “Claro!”
The Tin Man noticed a movement in one of the downed agents near their conversion van. He crossed the space in half a dozen steps and finished the wounded man.
DeVaca pulled himself back behind the wheel. “Excellent coordination, people. Everyone back aboard, and would someone please turn that ruido down on the television?”
He noticed a drop of blood on the back of his right hand as Dorothy reached through the open sliding door. The noise ended. Studying Burke’s body lying in the splattered snow, DeVaca licked the blood off as the others climbed back inside the still running van.
Pleased that ten of the closest trained responders in the area were out of action, DeVaca slid back into his seat and turned on the radio as doors slammed around him. The weather report was on.
“This tropical system coming out of Mexico is pumping enormous amounts of moisture into West Texas and will meet an abnormally strong Canadian Arctic front. It looks like this historic system will produce the heaviest snow we’ve seen in our area for over a hundred years. Blizzard conditions have already closed much of Interstate 40 from Amarillo to Albuquerque, and heavy snow is now falling from El Paso and the Big Bend region of the Texas/Mexico border along Interstate 20 as far east as Weatherford, Texas. The National Weather Service is predicting as much as fifteen to twenty inches of accumulation in the Ballard/ Alpine/Ft. Stockton areas with drifts as high as four to five feet. Folks, hunker down where you are and avoid all travel as this storm moves to the northeast.”
Dorothy ejected the magazine from her pistol and dug into a canvas bag on the floorboard. She slapped a fresh mag into the butt, registering the bright red sprays in the snow outside her window. “I thought you said we’d avoid this.”
DeVaca shrugged. “It is one of those things. Every military plan becomes moot when the enemy is met.”
“This shouldn’t have happened.”
“A lot of things should not happen, but they do.” He steered over Burke’s body as if it were nothing but a soft speed bump and accelerated onto the smooth, unmarked highway disappearing into the bleak and windy expanse of West Texas.
Visibility was worse than when they’d arrived only minutes before, and when DeVaca glanced into the side mirror, the swath they plowed was wide and deep. Huge snowflakes swept up and over the windshield. “We came this way instead of from El Paso or the border to miss the permanent stations, but there is no way to anticipate these mobile checkpoints.”
Dorothy holstered the weapon under her shirt. “I don’t like surprises.”
DeVaca ignored her and turned up the radio’s volume. “. . . most roads are already closed, or will be closed soon. Driving is treacherous out here in the Big Bend, folks, so stay home where it’s safe and warm. I’ll be back with the full forecast after this message from Ballard Plumbing.”
DeVaca’s stomach fluttered in anticipation. Safe and warm. That would soon change. A grin tugged at his mouth.
They were fortunate with the storm. His commander back in Houston, Marc Chavez, couldn’t have scheduled it any better. The weather had paralyzed the region, giving them more than enough time to complete their mission and escape. He clicked his teeth together, as if chewing, and fantasized about what his team might encounter next.
DeVaca, a U.S. citizen, had joined Dorothy, Lion, Tin Man, and Scarecrow days earlier after the group had slipped into the U.S. across Lake Amistad, a reservoir straddling the border of Texas and Mexico. They came in with help from a human trafficker who provided a safe house in Comstock, Texas, where DeVaca picked them up in the van two days later.
Dorothy was there with counterfeit documents provided by DeVaca, because he was intrigued by the attractive Mexican national months earlier while visiting a whorehouse in Nuevo Laredo. Dorothy’s smooth face and flawless skin made her look naive and delicious. He was pleased to find that she was almost as emotionless as he. It didn’t take long to bring her into his cause. For her, his plans were exciting and dangerous, and the promised money didn’t hurt, either.
Having her around soon fanned a fire he’d banked years earlier. Cutting his eyes across the van, he saw her nipples were hard against her shirt. Sometimes Dorothy made it difficult to concentrate.
Her appearance of innocence sparked DeVaca’s amusing idea of nicknaming his team after characters in The Wizard of Oz, a distinctly American movie. The nicknames also kept their dispensable association impersonal, as were the other three components of his army converging on the Ballard Courthouse.
He passed the still-hot Scorpion to her. Dorothy ejected the magazine without a word and reloaded the stubby machine pistol with a fresh thirty-round stick. She watched her side mirror as the checkpoint receded into the falling snow. “With those migras out of the way, our chances have increased.”
“Yes.” DeVaca dragged his eyes back to the road before they flicked to his rearview mirror. “You gentlemen were magnificent.” To throw them a bone, he said it again in Spanish. “Ustedes, señores eran magníficos!”
The mercenaries gave him a thumbs-up as they passed a snow-covered sign that announced their destination was two miles away. They reloaded their weapons with fresh magazines from the pockets on their vests.
Dorothy handed the Scorpion back to DeVaca. As they punched through the storm, she covered her head and face with an adapted version of hijab, not for religious reasons, but to keep from getting shot in the back by the radical Muslim team coming in from the west.
She’d learned to play all the angles during her short, turbulent life.
DeVaca took his eyes off the road for another look at Dorothy’s delicious dimples before she covered them up. “You were wonderful, too.”
Chapter 2
The heaviest snow I’d ever seen was falling on my little West Texas town. Thick freezing fog and a patch of black ice covering the sidewalk damn near took me down when I stepped up on the curb. It wasn’t really black, but clear and dangerous as hell.
Snow followed the predawn burst of sleet and freezing rain to accumulate on muddy pickups angled in against the sidewalk curb like horses waiting at a hitching post. In fact, iron posts with tether rings still stuck out from the concrete sidewalks. The Chamber of Commerce liked having the hitching posts out front because the tourists thought it made Ballard seem more like the Old West.
An antiques shop and an art gallery bracketed the Chat ’N Chew. Water droplets from snowflakes blowing against the café’s eighty-year-old windows melted and ran in rivulets to the sill, where they refroze.
I pushed open the door and stepped inside, pausing to stomp the snow off my feet. The smell of coffee, spices, and frying bacon made my stomach growl.
Sheriff Ethan Armstrong had his back to me at the counter, working his way through a Western Plate. I kept trying to get Dolores to rename it Heart Attack on a Plate because the chili relleno wrapped in an omelet and topped with cheese, bacon, sausage, pancakes, biscuits, and gravy just had to be bad for you.
The air was filled with conversation from locals and tourists. Most of the locals gathered on the café’s right side, where they had long ago abandoned all pretense of private dining by shifting chairs between tables in ever evolving conversational groups. As soon as one group disbanded, the others adjuste
d their positions around the tables with the jarring, stuttering sounds of dragging chairs. That chaos, clutter, and our small-town familiarity pushed most tourists to the left side.
Traditional country music from the jukebox backfilled the customer’s voices. Dolores won’t allow any of what she calls rock-and-roll bubblegum country on her machine. Dwight Yoakum filled her bill that morning, and when he finished, George Strait took over.
I unbuttoned my ranch coat, hung it on the rack by the door, and threw up a hand in greeting toward the regulars as I headed for the counter. Most didn’t stop talking, but everyone waved back. West Texas folks are courteous, and we always wave when we pass each other on the highway. It seems like most of us drive with one wrist hanging over the top of the steering wheel to make it easy to raise a hand in greeting or to flick an index finger.
You’d always get an answering wave or flick, unless some old sorehead passed, and we had a few of those, like anywhere else.
The tourists were more interested in me than my friends. Heads swiveled around like radar dishes. It’s not my blue shirt and khakis they were interested in, though that’s a dead giveaway. It’s the Silverbelly hat made by the O’Farrell Hat Company, the Colt 1911 .45 in a hand-tooled holster, and the Ranger badge stamped from a Mexican peso on my shirt. I’m proud to wear that badge, both for the job, and for the history.
Most of the regulars wore sweat-stained Stetsons and Resistols, drooping from hard use in the Texas sun. The hats in our part of the country were tools as useful as a mechanic’s wrench or a doctor’s stethoscope. The rest wore gimme caps.
Some folks might say it’s rude to wear hats and caps in the café, but we didn’t see it that way. In Dolores’s café and public buildings, most everybody kept their hats on, because hat hair isn’t something you want to see while you’re eating.
A round stool sat vacant beside Sheriff Armstrong. I’ve known him since the ninth grade when the Old Man moved us from East Texas to Ballard. We’d been running buddies from the first time we laid eyes on each other and managed to survive most of our high school scrapes with nothing more than bruises and the occasional community-service assignment from Chalk Ferguson, who was sheriff at that time. I straddled the red vinyl, on the opposite side of the Beretta M-9 automatic in his hand-tooled holster.
Ethan cut his eyes toward me, and the crows-feet at the corners deepened when he smiled. He tilted his hat back with a free thumb. “Well, look what the cat drug in, a real-live Texas Ranger. How you doin’, Sonny?”
Dolores thumped a thick white mug on the counter in front of me and filled it with steaming coffee. She knows everybody who lives in Ballard. Her soft voice, light Spanish accent, and strong personality draw people to that woman like a magnet. “Mornin’, hon.”
I once heard Dolores referred to as “that big-boned gal,” and I reckon that’s what she is. She’s as solid as a tree trunk and don’t jiggle at all, well, maybe in a couple of places you’d expect.
Before I could answer, she topped off Ethan’s coffee. “Here you go, baby.” She was off with the pot.
Ethan swept a forefinger under his brush-pile mustache and pushed the mug away to make more room to work with his fork. “It’s a good day to stay inside.”
“I would if I could.”
“You ain’t a-woofin’. You back on the job?”
“Next week.”
He knew my desk time on administrative leave was nothing more than a formality after I came up on the attempted murder of a highway patrol officer a few weeks earlier and had to use my weapon. I learned a long time ago to use enough gun, and even though I missed what I was aiming at because of the distance, the heavy slug from my .45 hit the assailant’s boot heel, knocking his feet out from under him. The guy went down hard, cracking his head on the concrete. He died from a subdural hematoma, and his death had me riding a desk for a while. We were confident that the routine investigation would prove that I was justified in taking lethal action to stop the murder of Ian Frazier.
Ethan chewed his eggs and the crow’s-feet returned. “Been meaning to ask you, did you intend to shoot that guy in the heel?”
I leaned in. “You know how I am. I was aiming at his head.” I’d never killed anyone before, and it bothered me late at night when the house was quiet and I was laying in bed waiting to go to sleep.
He swallowed. “I never heard of such a thing, a guy getting shot in the boot heel and falling hard enough to hit his head and die.”
“It stopped him.”
“That it did. That’s why I—”
His eyes flicked to my holster and I finished the old saying “—use enough gun.”
He laughed and I jerked a thumb toward his plate when Dolores came by. “How about some huevos rancheros?”
I was always partial to eggs, beans, and tomato-chili sauce. I learned to like them when I was kid, sweating beside the Mexican hands when Dad went out to help work their cattle. If they had time in the mornings, the ranchers fed us a full breakfast, and that often meant their own version of huevos rancheros.
Dolores swung around the counter “Sure thing, baby.”
My Old Man was once a Ranger in East Texas, but gave it up after Mama was murdered and he couldn’t solve the case, no matter how hard he tried. He lost his taste for that part of the country, and sold most of the family land, but kept some acreage north of Paris. He used that money and a little savings to buy four sections of ranchland on the opposite side of the state, southwest of Ballard.
We lived on beans and potatoes for several years as he worked to make a go of the little ranch, little in the sense that some of the old ranches in the Big Bend region are hundreds of sections in size.
My first years growing up on the eastern side of the state is why I speak a little different than the folks in Ballard. I always stuck out like a sore thumb with my way of phrasing things. Most people who’ve never been to Texas have no idea the state’s so big there are five different geographical regions, each with a different way of talking and phrasing things.
“Scrambled, not fried.”
“Gringo! But I still love ya, Sonny.” She still had the most beautiful eyes in town, despite five husbands, three kids, and a hard life of café work.
Ethan grinned again. “She never called you baby when we were kids.”
“She never called me much of nothing.” The crowd behind us laughed, and I jerked my head in their direction. “Looks like ever’body decided to stay in out of the weather.”
“Smart thing to do. So why’re you out so early this morning if you don’t have to report in?”
“Didn’t say that. Right now, I’m an errand boy, but I’d rather do that than sit around twiddling my thumbs. Kelly’s taking her students on a field trip to the courthouse, so I’ll visit with them for a while. She has this kid I’m mentoring and she wants me to spend a little more time with him.”
“Someone I know?”
“You might. Name’s Arturo.”
Ethan pushed his empty plate back and slipped his finger into the handle of the thick white mug. “Arturo Alonzo.”
I was surprised. “That’s right. How you know him?”
He blew and sipped. “Picked him up a couple of times, running the streets. He’s hanging with some Mexican kids that live in a dirt floor shack about a mile out of town. Those little turds are mean as snakes. I’m afraid he’s going to get in trouble with ’em, and they won’t give a flip if he goes to jail. They’ll wind up hanging something on that boy before it’s all said and done.”
“Maybe double-teaming him might help.”
“Might do it, now that his old man’s been deported. I picked him up the other night for fighting and called ICE to come get him.”
Dolores slid my breakfast across the counter. “Let me know when that runs out, and I’ll fill ’er up again.”
I dug in, and our section of the counter quieted for a while. I came up for air when Ethan jerked his thumb toward the flat-panel television on
the wall. A weatherman was pointing toward a front coming in our direction.
He cut his eyes at me. “I’m afraid this is gonna be a long day. Dolores, can you turn that up?”
She kept the remote on a long jute cord attached to a horseshoe nailed to a wall stud behind the counter because she got tired of losing it, and really tired of the sports channels. “I will in a minute.”
“He’s giving the forecast right now. It’ll be over by the time you get back.”
“It’s the Weather Channel, you knothead. They say the same thing all day long.” She stopped and well-roped the cord with both hands, dragging the device across the counter. She turned the volume up and left the remote beside Ethan and muttered to herself. “That is, if they aren’t showing those stupid reality shows of theirs. I swear, the Weather Channel should stick to the weather.”
The crowd shifted to make room for newcomers, and chairs squalled on the linoleum. A George Jones song came on the jukebox. Dolores rang up a sale and traded four tourists for six.
“So Kelly roped you into helping her out again?” Ethan kept one eye on the TV screen. The weatherman stood in front of a map of the United States and northern Mexico. A thick blue line bowed southward, indicating a strong cold front dropping down from Canada was already on top of Ballard. From the southwest, the spiral of a hurricane near Acapulco, Mexico, followed a skirmish line of arrows sweeping in a wide semicircle to the north toward the Big Bend.
They looked to overlap right on top of us.
“Yep. Like I don’t have my hands full with her, the twins, and the job. She says it’s my mission to help, and she don’t mind pushing me toward it, neither.”
My wife teaches at Big Bend High, and every time she talks me into helping with some of her students, I say it’s the last time, but it never is.
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